Monthly Archives: October 2011

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President Obama’s Iraq troop withdrawal should finally silence the naysayers. And there have been many of them. GOP leaders pound him relentlessly for being weak, ineffectual, and indecisive on military and foreign policy aims and goals. His handling of the Iraq war supposedly was the ultimate proof of that. Liberal Democrats and progressives screamed at him for allegedly betraying his much stated pledge as a US Senator and a presidential candidate to end the war, and end it quickly once in the White House. The critics did not take one glaring fact into consideration. Wars are always easy to start, but never easy to end, especially when they are inherited from another administration, an administration of the opposing party. That was the case first with Korea. President Eisenhower made the dramatic campaign pledge in 1952 to end the Korean War stalemate. He inherited the war from Democrat Harry Truman. It took more than a year after he took office, and thousands more US casualties, prolonged and complex negotiations, and a determined opposition from military generals and war hawks to pulverize Korea and even China with nuclear weapons to get a final war settlement.
President Nixon had the same difficulty in ending the Vietnam War, a war he inherited from Democrat Lyndon Johnson. It took six years of hard fighting, thousands more US casualties and the final crushing collapse of South Vietnam’s U.S. backed puppet government nearly six years after Nixon said he had a secret plan to end the war, and won the White House in 1968 before the U.S. finally cashed in its chips.
President Obama faced the same dilemma as his predecessors who made promises to end their unpopular wars but given the vagaries of war, political and military opposition, and massive vested interests in perpetuating war found that extricating the country from Iraq was no simple matter. The eight year ground war with U.S. troops taking casualties, inflicting death and destruction on towns and villages, and heavy collateral damage, i.e. civilian deaths, stirred international, and regional hatred of the US, and reaffirmed the US image as the bully boy of the world. The war was a colossal domestic and international disaster, and the mountainous lies and deception that the Bush administration used to get and keep the US in Iraq will be a permanent mark of historical disgrace and shame on the Bush legacy.

The more important thing for Obama and the nation is the political consequence of the withdrawal. The Iraq war was never simply a military contest to get rid of a hated dictator, in a country that supposedly posed a massive threat to Israel and moderate Arab governments. It was a political war waged to assert American political dominance, control strategic oil resources, to bolster the military hawk credentials of the Bush administration and to boost Bush’s tenuous and sagging personal image and popularity on the home front. Obama understood that as long as the bullets, American bullets, flew at Iraqi targets, the US would continue to suffer the deeply flawed and failed political consequences of its overt military involvement in the country.
Obama also learned another lesson, a negative one, from Bush’s Iraq folly. In announcing that the troops would be home by Christmas, he did not declare “mission accomplished” with the withdrawal. The mission accomplished boast would be tantamount to declaring the war a US victory. To tout a war that should never have been fought and then fought for the wrong reasons, and in the wrong way, would be laughable and insulting, especially considering that there is no guarantee that the country will be the oasis of peace, democracy, and stability that supposedly was the goal of waging the war in the first place.
The Iraq war was an ugly and shameful page in US history. Obama early on recognized that, and recognized that millions of Americans were furious and frustrated by it, and the first chance he got to fulfill his pledge to end the war would be a solid plus for his administration and the country. GOP leaders and presidential candidates will wag ineffectual fingers at him for supposedly weakening US resolve in the region, and some on the other side will rail at him for not getting out of Iraq the first day he entered the White House. But all that really counts is he did what he said and finally ended the conflict. The naysayers can’t take that away from him.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

President Obama’s Iraq troop withdrawal should finally silence the naysayers. And there have been many of them. GOP leaders pound him relentlessly for being weak, ineffectual, and indecisive on military and foreign policy aims and goals. His handling of the Iraq war supposedly was the ultimate proof of that. Liberal Democrats and progressives screamed at him for allegedly betraying his much stated pledge as a US Senator and a presidential candidate to end the war, and end it quickly once in the White House. The critics did not take one glaring fact into consideration. Wars are always easy to start, but never easy to end, especially when they are inherited from another administration, an administration of the opposing party. That was the case first with Korea. President Eisenhower made the dramatic campaign pledge in 1952 to end the Korean War stalemate. He inherited the war from Democrat Harry Truman. It took more than a year after he took office, and thousands more US casualties, prolonged and complex negotiations, and a determined opposition from military generals and war hawks to pulverize Korea and even China with nuclear weapons to get a final war settlement.
President Nixon had the same difficulty in ending the Vietnam War, a war he inherited from Democrat Lyndon Johnson. It took nearly six years after Nixon said he had a secret plan to end the war, and won the White House in 1968. It took six years of hard fighting, thousands more US casualties and the final crushing collapse of South Vietnam’s U.S. backed puppet government before the U.S. finally cashed in its chips.

President Obama faced the same dilemma as his predecessors who made promises to end their unpopular wars but given the vagaries of war, political and military opposition, and massive vested interests in perpetuating war. Extricating the country from Iraq was no simple matter. The eight year ground war with U.S. troops taking casualties, inflicting death and destruction on towns and villages, and heavy collateral damage, i.e. civilian deaths, stirred international, and regional hatred of the US, and reaffirmed the US image as the bully boy of the world. The war was a colossal domestic and international disaster, and the mountainous lies and deception that the Bush administration used to get and keep the US in Iraq will be a permanent mark of historical disgrace and shame on the Bush legacy.

The more important thing for Obama and the nation is the political consequence of the withdrawal. The Iraq war was never simply a military contest to get rid of a hated dictator, in a country that supposedly posed a massive threat to Israel and moderate Arab governments. It was a political war waged to assert American political dominance, control strategic oil resources, to bolster the military hawk credentials of the Bush administration and to boost Bush’s tenuous and sagging personal image and popularity on the home front. Obama understood that as long as the bullets, American bullets, flew at Iraqi targets, the US would continue to suffer the deeply flawed and failed political consequences of its overt military involvement in the country.

Obama also learned another lesson, a negative one, from Bush’s Iraq folly. In announcing that the troops would be home by Christmas, he did not declare “mission accomplished” with the withdrawal. The mission accomplished boast would be tantamount to declaring the war a US victory. To tout a war that should never have been fought and then fought for the wrong reasons, and in the wrong way, would be laughable and insulting, especially considering that there is no guarantee that the country will be the oasis of peace, democracy, and stability that supposedly was the goal of waging the war in the first place.

The Iraq war was an ugly and shameful page in US history. Obama early on recognized that, and recognized that millions of Americans were furious and frustrated by it, and the first chance he got to fulfill his pledge to end the war would be a solid plus for his administration and the country. GOP leaders and presidential candidates will wag ineffectual fingers at him for supposedly weakening US resolve in the region, and some on the other side will rail at him for not getting out of Iraq the first day he entered the White House. But all that really counts is he did what he said and finally ended the conflict. The naysayers can’t take that away from him.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

The cheers that GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain got from the GOP faithful at the Las Vegas GOP presidential debate for his full throated defense of Wall Street and his trash of the unemployed for being unemployed was no surprise. The mantra of the GOP crowd since the Ronald Reagan era has been that Democratic rule equals big government equals big spending equals stifling private enterprise job creation. This supposedly equals millions of unemployed whose job skills, initiative, and willingness to find work are sharply eroded. The conclusion is that if you’re unemployed, and poverty stricken don’t blame business, blame failed Democratic government policies, but most all they should blame themselves. It’s textbook blame the victim bashing and the GOP does it best. Cain just sniffed the political tea leaves on that line and knew that it would strike a comfortable nerve with the party faithful.

But the painful truth is that the cheers that Cain got for his poor bashing are no aberration. Political and public references to poverty and the plight of the unemployed virtually disappeared from the nation’s vocabulary by the end of the 1960s. Such talk flew squarely in the face of the embedded laissez faire notion that if one lost a job, or never sought one, and remained on the unemployment rolls for prolonged periods of time, it wasn’t because of any failing of the system, but because of their personal failings, slough, or unwillingness to get training education and skills to make themselves job or career ready. The notion that the unemployed are to blame for their plight became even more irresistible in the 1990s. This was a time of renewed job growth and economic expansion. The unemployment levels had sunk to low single digit numbers and jobs appeared to be plentiful for anyone who wanted one.

By the first year of the Bush administration in 2001, a decisive majority of Americans were more convinced than ever that poverty and unemployment were the fault of those that were poor and unemployed. In a national poll, that year conducted by National Public Radio (NPR), the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University’s Kennedy School, a majority of Americans repeatedly tossed out the terms “unmotivated,” “lacked aspirations to get ahead,” and “didn’t work hard enough” to describe the downtrodden. A majority believed America was a place where with hard work and determination anyone could succeed. In other words, the loud message was that if you’re poor and unemployed, don’t blame society, and don’t look to government to provide the tonic.
This line repeatedly cropped up again and again during the fight President Obama waged over opposition from Senate Republicans to extend unemployment benefits earlier this year. GOP opponents trotted out studies and cited the opinions of conservative economists that alleged that doling out unemployment checks for a lengthy period only made the unemployed hopelessly dependant on a government check, tarnished their job skills, and encouraged disinterest and indolence in getting back in the labor market. The same argument is ruthlessly cited again now that Democrats again propose to stretch out the time frame for unemployment benefits. GOP opponents of the unemployment benefits extension proposal in President Obama’s Jobs Bill latched onto the quip from Alan B. Krueger, picked to head Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, that increasing unemployment benefits prolong unemployment. Even a significant number of those unemployed agree with that. In a Rutgers University survey in September, more than one in four respondents opposed renewing the current extended unemployment benefits.

The massive corporate layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, and the sharp plunge in public employment by local and state governments that have dumped tens of thousands of hard working, educated, and diligent workers onto the unemployment rolls through no fault of their own, don’t count for much with conservatives. Nor does the Census Bureau report in September that says that unemployment benefits lifted more than three million people out of poverty in 2010 sway Cain and the GOP.

The widespread view that government should play a role in assisting the unemployed during times of economic crisis when the job market has shrunk or disappeared in many sectors will continue to be under assault. This suits major corporations and the financial industry to a tee at a time when they’ve racked up record profits, a record hoarding of cash, and are scrooge like in spending on job creation and making loans to small and medium sized businesses to jumpstart production and hiring. It lets them off the hook for their abominable economic failures and leaves the unemployed twisting and dangling on it. The applause that Cain got from his cheerleaders and the deeply embedded misguided notion from millions of Americans of why the unemployed are unemployed sadly isn’t likely to change.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

I was living next door to Libya, in Tunisia, when Gadhafi took power. No one thought that his coup would turn out well either for Libya or the region. But neither did anyone imagine how far his paranoid and evil impulses would go in bringing suffering and death to the wider world.

We have a disturbing pattern of calling our adversaries crazy, mad and unbalanced. In Gadhafi’s case these labels fit. Somehow the press has referred to him as “mercurial,” meaning flighty, volatile and unreliable. These are all too mild to characterize his ruinous role in the world over the past 42 years.

Libya was not a paradise that Gadhafi broke. It was briefly a kingdom ruled by the Senussi family, a monarchy of only one king, King Idris. Though the Senussi were Sufi, they were influenced by Salaafism (the Wahabbi movement). Before Idris, the family was instrumental in trying to bring Islam back to an anti-western fundamentalism and to get rid of Libya’s colonial occupiers.

In 1968, Idris threw out our American Peace Corps and began a program of nationalistic de-westernizing. Street signs, using the Roman alphabet, were torn down and only Arabic signage was left. This did not do wonders for tourism or the economy. Since major oil reserves had been discovered in 1959, the Libyans were not too concerned. They were concerned that Idris didn’t have a son, and when he named his nephew as crown prince then went for medical treatment in Turkey, Gadhafi and some other young officers instituted their coup.

Gadhafi quickly moved to eliminate rivals and build up his image in both the Arab World and in sub-Saharan Africa. He invented a form of Islamic Socialism and wrote his version of Mao’s Little Red Book, the Green Book. His attitude was aggressively evangelical combining his version–or perversion–of Islam and a very inauthentic kind of socialism, from which mostly he and his cronies profited.

Pretending to an equalitarian view, he didn’t promote himself above the rank of colonel. Always sounding very North Korean, he insisted on being addressed as “Brother Leader.” He isolated opposition, killed rivals and made sure no one could rise high enough to threaten him. He did this by seeming to decentralize power to small councils that he controlled. He was both cunning and cruel.

His megalomania and paranoia drove him to grandiosity and violence in foreign affairs. He caused a French airliner to be blown out of the sky years before the Lockerbie atrocity or the bombing of the German nightclub frequented by American soldiers. He interfered with other Arab nations and soon made enemies of both Iran and Egypt, and he has been constantly hostile towards Saudi Arabia. Having burned his bridges in the Arab World, he looked for recognition in Africa and courted such luminaries as Robert Mugabe. Few will sincerely mourn his passing.

However, even fewer anticipate a good outcome for Libya. Libya is not really a nation. Though blessed with abundant oil and a small population, this only makes it an attractive nuisance for Egypt and Algeria–both of which could use the oil. It is also divided by tribes, gangs and factions and has never truly functioned as a modern nation. Tripoli and Benghazi are not allies and in between them geographically is the territory of the Gadhafa Tribe. You can imagine how cooperative they will be–and truly how frightened they will and should be of revenge from other tribes.

The National Transition Council has already lost control of Tripoli as militias and factions have staked out territory, grabbed weapons and started imposing their own local and harsh brands of justice.

I hate to rain on the happy parade celebrating the end of Gadhafi’s reign of terror, but with all the potential in the world for a good outcome, that potential is very unlikely to be realized. Now it should be up to the Libyans to build their own future. However, with so much oil and so few people, various outside groups will compete for the spoils. Gadhafi is gone and that is a good thing. Tragically, it is the only good thing.

If I see one more picture of Steve Jobs, the patron saint of technology, I’m going to throw a dart at it. Given that the man was a genius. No one is arguing that, but, let’s face it. He was no saint, either.

The two things that knocked him down from the canonization process were one that he had an illegitimate daughter he never acknowledged and a father he never acknowledged, although he recently tried to contact him.

Maybe there is more than meets the eye here. Maybe, as some have speculated, his father would have asked him for money and the billionaire knew it. While I don’t think that anyone should use anyone else, what would it have been to float him a small loan or buy him a small island. It’s not like he was hurting for the money.

I also don’t understand why he didn’t acknowledge his illegitimate daughter. No one asks to be here. We just sort of show up to make the best of things, so to avoid her over something she had no say so in isn’t very helpful. He was also illegitimate himself, so he knows what it’s like, though maybe he never quite got over it.

With all his money, he wasn’t the most charitable sort, either. He did set up one eponymous foundation and hired Mark Vermilion, who worked for the charity Humanitas International, a charity founded by Joan Baez, who Jobs briefly dated, to run it, but the foundation shut down after he founded NeXT. When Apple began donating computers to nonprofits, it was Vermilion’s idea and not his. Generous he wasn’t.

His supporters say that he gave in other ways with life-changing inventions. Yet in my humble opinion, 8.3 billion dollars is a lot to leave around when there are sicknesses to cure, hungry mouths to feed, and animals to rescue.

Vermilion claims that jobs would have been more generous had he lived longer. “There are only so many hours in a week,” he said, “and he created so many incredible products. He really contributed to culture and society.” Still, it would have been better had he contributed to those who could not afford to buy retail let alone wholesale.

Of course Jobs’ genius changed the world to streamline communication, thought the Apple computer, the iPad and the iPhone, to name a few. Even though he didn’t have an engineering degree, his name is on 200 patents. Still, there is something to be said for giving to those who can’t afford electronic gadgets let alone a gallon of milk at the grocery store.